They are approximately as far-fetched as the ideas that AI will eventually destroy humanity or GMO crops will cause ecosystem collapse. Which is to say, it take

They are approximately as far-fetched as the ideas that AI will eventually destroy humanity or GMO crops will cause ecosystem collapse. Which is to say, it takes a new technology and contextualizes it with past bad behavior to try to imagine what the worst possible future looks like. If this technology is developed further and eventually becomes available to more than a tiny number of people, I don't think we can guess what the positive or negative effects on society will be. We never can; we live in a surveillance state, but it doesn't look like Orwell's 1984. We have advanced technology that the dreamers of the 1950s never foresaw, but no jetpacks or flying cars -- just miniaturized, globally-connected pocket computers designed to capture as much attention as possible. The global climate has continued to worsen since alarms were broadly sounded in the 1980s, but most of us that have the luxury of discussing the topic are sitting in nice little homes and offices and blissfully untouched by it all. We have high-tech network-connected systems and a mix of severely concentrated wealth and a much larger impoverished group, but none of this looks like cyberpunk genre fiction. Bad futures tend to happen gently enough for them to seem perfectly acceptable. A lot of people even come to defend them.